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Sunday, 15 June 2014

Boiled Beans on Toast, A Play - Girish Karnad

The name of the play suggests that Girish Karnad loves making or eating boiled beans on toast but it is not so. Obviously. No character in the narrative eats boiled beans on toast either.

Boiled Beans
on Toast is a story based in Bengaluru, Karnataka. On one hand it shows
citizens being fed up of the construction and traffic of the city and on the
other hand, inquisitive migrants who enjoy observing these things. This story is also about how people go to metropolitan
cities to live their dreams but sometimes their dreams shatter and the
reflection cannot be seen, even in a million broken fragments. The play doesn't seek to impart any morals to the readers but is a view of the city without sunglasses.

It portrays
the different economic segments of the society and their lives.The upper caste
of the society doesn't believe in the caste system. The middle class believes in it. Nowadays, belief in the caste system is looked down upon. The lower caste is the least
bothered about all this. But it is clear from the narrative that it is still present
in Bengaluru.

The
characters in this book are very entertaining.

Starting
from the topmost leaf of the family tree, the
Grandmother- Anusuya has only one past time. Betting in Horse Races. She
studies the pedigree of each horse before placing a bet and gradually ends up pawning her
jewellery to get 2.5 lakhs for betting. Anusuya isn't the regular religious
Grandma but indeed a very interesting character.

Mr. Padabidri is a business tycoon.

His wife Anjana Padabidri is the rich, idle
housewife. To spend her free time, she visits a Karunashraya which means an 'abode
of compassion' and is for the care of advanced stage cancer patients. She is
very hospitable to guests and loves treating them to a hot cup of chai (tea). In earlier days,
Anjana was a veena player and sang the
compositions of a famous saint. She used to spend time with her Bengali
neighbour and learnt Rabindra Sangeet from him in her previous home since her husband
didn't have much time for her. Anjana tried to kill herself and her son by
eating sleeping pills after the neighbour left. Clearly, she was in love with
him. Miraculusly, she didn't die.She stopped singing after that and later on, only sang in the
Karunashraya.

Kunaal Padabidri, the son of Anjana and Mr. Padabidri is a veena player but plays the
guitar as a rebel. He has a girlfriend Nandita and he spends some nights at her
house against his parents' wishes. He supports the Grandmother when she pawns
her jewellery. He wants to make a career in music.

Dolly, Anjana's friend and Vimala, Anjana's
maidservant are the villains in the story.

Dolly spends
most of her free time in Anjana's house. Dolly sends Prabhakar, a man who comes
to join Mr. Padabidri's office to Singapore by telling him that he would get a
job in Wipro. Prabhakar isn't scheduled for a proper interview and even after
negotiating, he isn't able to get a job, all because of Dolly. He even lost the job he was doing before going to Singapore. Dolly makes people dream that they are
very close to achieving their goals and fulfilling their hopes and aspirations but eventually,
shatters them. She also tries to send a dance teacher in a school to the
Trinity Laban Dance School in London, but we all know the consequences of this. Dolly messes with other people's lives because her own life is in a mess. Dolly is also beaten up by her husband regularly.

Vimala, a
maidservant is accused of stealing jewellery from another house in which she
works. She owns a scooter, can con the cops because she is adept at lying and it
is very difficult to find out where she lives. The anonymity that the city offers, provides a convenient cover to her. At one point of time in the
play, Kunaal considers to have Vimala as his girlfriend. She accuses Muttu who
is the second maidservant at the Padabidri household of stealing her job when the Padabidris suspect her behaviour.
Vimala blackmails Muttu by telling her that her brother, Shankara is lying
wounded in the hospital but doesn't reveal the name of the hospital.

Muttu's family is very tight on money
and she and her husband are barely able to call 30 people for their daughter's
wedding. The food goes uneaten on the wedding because a family feud breaks out
but let's not go into that right now.

To know the characters better and
uncover the rest of the things not mentioned, do read the play. The ending of
the narrative is very vague though. There are many stories going on in
the play simultaneously, but they don't seem to connect in the end. Kunaal's new composition
is titled 'Big Bang Bangalore is a Big
Black Hole' after he realizes that all of them are insignificant in a huge city
like Bengaluru and the fact that the world would have gone on even if some
person say 'xyz' didn't exist in the world.

This play has been enacted as a Marathi adaptation -'Uney Purey Shahar Ek' for a theatre company - 'Aasakta'.